


Recontextualization

by alpacasandravens



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bi Dean Winchester, Canon Compliant, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, because, he dies in the ep, mild homophobic thoughts, the major character death is cas, ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Dean always knew Cas loved him. But he never thought Cas was in love with him, and that's hardly something he can process after seeing him die before his eyes.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 15
Kudos: 193





	Recontextualization

**Author's Note:**

> I stopped watching supernatural in season 12 and I think that's very sexy of me.

“Goodbye, Dean.” 

The uncanny darkness moved over Cas, swallowing him until all Dean could see were his eyes, red-rimmed and still full of tears, and then he was gone. 

“Cas?” Dean called. He knew he wouldn’t get a response. The Empty had taken him, and he was gone. 

All Dean could think, as he stood rooted to the spot, was that this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. He’d always known that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no time where he would settle down, give up hunting, and have a normal life. There hadn’t even been a time when he’d expected that, or wanted it. Dying on the job wasn’t just an occupational hazard, it was inevitable. Hell, he and Sam had done it a time or twenty. 

But it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

He wasn’t supposed to watch his best friend die and be powerless to stop it. Hunters died young; he knew that. But Cas wasn’t a hunter. Not really, anyway, not unless you counted that one hunt eight years ago.

It wasn’t even that Dean thought Cas was safe because he was an angel. He hadn’t really been an angel for a long time (Since the angels fell? Before then, since the war in Heaven?) and anyway, he’d seen enough angels die to know there was nothing special to save them. Certainly not Chuck. 

But something about this felt wrong. The unfairness, probably. What kind of deal would kill Cas when he was happy? How long had Cas known of this? Walked around, unhappy, waiting for the moment when he would die?

And what he’d said… Dean couldn’t think about that. He couldn’t. 

Dean wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there, staring at the same empty space, when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen just long enough to see it was Sam before declining the call. Shoving the phone back in his pocket, he took three shaky steps backward to lean on the wall. He only meant to use it for support, but somehow Dean found himself sliding down the wall, ending up in a jumbled heap on the floor. 

“I love you,” Cas had said. 

Why had he said that? Why was that his moment of happiness, telling Dean he loved him? Cas had told Sam and Dean he loved them before, countless times. They were best friends, dammit, it wasn’t like this was news. So why had he sounded like he was saying something revelatory? Where had the joy in his eyes come from? 

Dean leaned his head back against the wall. He might be crying, he thought. He didn’t wipe the tears from his face; he couldn’t summon the energy. 

Why the hell had Cas said that? Because the more he thought about it, the more Dean thought there was only one thing Cas had meant, and it wasn’t best friends. But that wasn’t right, Cas wasn’t like that. Dean would have known. 

Would he?

Dean remembered that time, ages and ages ago, when he’d taken Cas to a sex club. Cas had been slated to die. (He couldn’t remember why, and he hated that they’d all died so many times the deaths blended together in his memory.) “I am not letting you die a virgin,” Dean had said, and he’d set Cas up with some girl. Destiny, her name might have been. Charity? Chastity. That’s right, because he’d had a good laugh about it. And Cas hadn’t had sex with her, he’d tried to comfort her and ended up scaring the living shit out of her, because that had been early days yet, and talking to humans wasn’t his forte. 

Was that why he’d been uncomfortable? Not because he was an angel in what could charitably be called a house of sin, but because he’d been in love with Dean the whole time and  _ Dean had taken him there? _

Briefly, a memory flashed across Dean’s mind: him, Sam, and Bobby talking about some case at a shitty motel table, and Cas examining the hotel’s pay per view like he was seeing a new layer of the world. Dean pushed that thought out of his head immediately - he couldn’t deal with Cas saying he loved him, he sure as hell couldn’t deal with thinking about  _ that _ .

Sam called again. Or, more accurately, Sam called for the fifth time. Dean pulled his phone out of his front pocket. He still sat crumpled against the wall. The room before him was still empty. Not empty like the dark roiling thing that had taken Cas. Just - nothing. 

He considered not answering. Putting the phone back in his pocket and sitting there some more, until he thinks he can pull himself together again. But Sam would be worrying, so he answered it.

“Hey, you okay?” Sam asks. He was worried, and Dean hadn’t known he could feel worse than he already did, but he felt like shit for scaring Sam. “Haven’t been picking up your phone.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. 

“Really? Oh, okay. Great. Jack and I are -”

“No.” He didn’t know why he said it. He’s had so much practice holding any emotion in, pretending he was fine, just having an extra beer or two to knock him out faster. But today, he can’t pretend. “Sam?”

“Yeah?” Now Sam was scared too, and somehow that’s just as bad, but Dean had already started talking, and he couldn’t stop.

“Cas is gone,” he said. “The Empty took him.”

There was silence. Sam drew in a deep breath. “Oh,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Dean hung up before Sam could start to say he was sorry. 

It was dark when Dean left the room. He sat just outside the building’s door and looked out at the woods. The dark here, too, was different than what had wrapped around Cas, the night a thinner, less viscous entity. There were probably werewolves in those woods. Or a shifter, or even a wildly out of place vampire. Dean didn’t care. 

_ Cas loved him _ . Cas was gone.

These were indisputable facts, and Dean hated both of them. He hated that he couldn’t go to where Cas was and pull him out, the way Cas had pulled Dean out of Hell, the way that Dean had tried to save Cas from Purgatory. He hated that now, if he prayed to Cas, there would never be anyone listening. And he couldn’t feel anything but anger when he thought of Cas’s final words. Anger, and a deep, crushing emptiness. Fitting. 

What the hell had that been about? What, Dean thought, had Cas been thinking? The bloody handprint on Dean’s shirt had long since dried, but he ran his fingers over it, the fabric stiff under his fingers. 

Cas loved him, and he’d died to save him, and if Dean had heard him right, Cas had loved him from the beginning. The scar on his shoulder was gone now, not lasting through countless deaths and resurrections. But Dean could almost feel it still, under the new handprint on his shirt. When has Cas known he loved Dean? Was it when he left that scar, dragging Dean out of Hell itself? Or was it later?

Because, Dean thought, there were three kinds of love. There was family, what he felt for Sammy. There was romantic love, which Dean didn’t know if he’d ever felt - he’d never let himself get comfortable enough in one place, with one person. He’d seen how this kind of love had torn Sam apart, first with Jessica, and Madison, and on and on, over and over again, and Dean had counted himself lucky.

The third kind of love was what Dean had thought Cas felt for them, at first. Dean wasn’t religious, in the sense that he’d met God but had never been inside a church to worship. But he had this idea of divine love, that years of being targeted by angels and slighted by Chuck hadn’t quite rid him of. That angels like Cas loved the earth and its occupants just by virtue of their existence. It was a selfless kind of love, and Dean had long assumed that, even if Raphael and Uriel and Balthazar and everyone else didn’t have this, Cas must have. Because Cas was good, more so than any other angel he’d ever met. 

But now… Cas said he’d cared about the world because of Dean, because Dean had shown him how to love it. And that was a crazy thought. There was no way that Dean, with all his emotions close to his chest and all the blood on his hands, could make an angel love humanity. By all rights, Cas should have hated humanity once he’d seen Dean.

And he’d fallen in love with him anyway. 

_ Shit _ . 

Sam drove up just as the sun was starting to rise. Jack was with him, passed out in the passenger seat, snoring lightly. 

“Have you been out here all night?” Sam asked. 

Dean blinked. Had he?

The thing was, Dean thought as he reluctantly sat in the back seat of the Impala, he shouldn’t be as thrown by this as he was. He’d never had a problem listening to Charlie talk about girls, or hearing Max offhandedly mention a date with some man. But something about Cas saying he loved Dean, that he was _ in love with _ Dean, made him feel aware of himself in a way he had never been. 

Dean checked to make sure Jack was still asleep before he spoke. 

“What happened at the silo?”

“Everybody… it was bad,” Sam said. “Really bad.”

“It was bad here too,” Dean said quietly. “But Billie’s gone. Cas took her with him.”

Sam breathed out. It wasn’t quite a sigh of relief, but it was something close. Relief and mourning all rolled into one indescribable emotion.

“Hey Sam?” Dean said a minute or two later. Sam looked back at him in the rearview mirror; Dean stared out the side window, refusing to make eye contact. “Did Cas ever say anything? About me?”

This was, Dean knew, a shitty thing to ask. When Sam had just seen Eileen and Bobby and Charlie and so many others vanish. When they were both just barely holding on. 

“What do you mean?”

Dean curled his right hand into a fist and pressed his nails into his palm, letting the almost-pain ground him. “Before he died, Cas…” He looked over at Jack again. Saying this to Sam was weird enough, he definitely wasn’t going to let the kid overhear him having a crisis. “Cas told me he loves me.”

Sam didn’t respond right away, and that was answer enough. 

Looking back was hard. It would have been anyway, it was always next to impossible to lose a friend, no matter how many times you had temporarily lost them before. There was always the chance that one of these deaths would be permanent, that he would truly never see them again, and he couldn’t help feeling like this one really was the end. 

But, somehow, it was worse this time. Because now, when Dean thought back on all the good times that he and Cas had shared, there was the ever-present thought “He was in love with me then.” When Dean had given Cas his first beer and Cas had gotten unbearably drunk off just that one drink - he had been in love with Dean then. When Dean had found a way out of Purgatory, and Cas wouldn’t go with him, Cas had been in love with him and thought he didn’t deserve him. 

If anything, it was the opposite. Cas, no matter how many times he’d fucked up, was literally an angel. He saw his mistakes for what they were and he worked to correct them and he was good in a way Dean could never be. 

Dean thought about the first time Cas had died, when the Leviathans inside him had exploded and all that had been left of him was a dirty trench coat floating in a filthier lake. He thought of how he’d washed that trench coat and kept it in the trunk for nearly a year until Cas came back, because he never lost faith that he wouldn’t. 

And Dean thought that might be what Cas meant when he said he cared for the world because of Dean. And he might have cared for the world because of Cas. 

**Author's Note:**

> this work started as a joke but i really hope it brought some joy to this already wild situation :)


End file.
